Mixx it Up With a Free Hosted Community

Frequently, when I speak with people about launching their own blog I also mention the possibility of building their own content aggregator on a specific topic. For instance if you have a blog about sports, you may want to consider including an aggregator of all the news and conversations across the web on the topic. This helps provide your community with more content while reducing the amount of content that you need to personally produce.

Today Mixx introduced a unique way to create your own community for your site or a topic and the discussions that are taking place around your site or topic. While this isn’t the open source version similar to what Reddit released recently, it is a quick and easy way to generate your own custom community. One of the interesting things about these communities is that Mixx provides you with monetization opportunities.

Mixx will share 50 percent of the revenue earned from advertising on your Mixx community. The only downside that I see from this is the challenge of getting users to your community. Without users it will be difficult to get people to submit content. That’s why I’ve suggested automated aggregators to clients in the past because it helps them consistently have quality content whether or not the community is involved.

I haven’t had the opportunity to go build a custom community on the site yet but I checked out a few others that looked pretty interesting. One of the communities I found interesting was the social news community which happened to have one of my articles directly at the top. If you want your own community for your brand, check out Mixx communities.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.